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Campsie : Presbytery of Glasgow, Synod of Glasgow and Ayr, County of Stirling. The Parish of Campsie measures eight English miles in length, and seven in breadth . . . . It is bounded on the North by the parish of Fintry; on the West by Strathblane and Baldernock; on the South by Calder and Kirkintilloch; and on the East by Kilsyth; forming a distinct commissariat along with Hamilton, stiled the commissariat of Hamilton and Campsie. Kedgeree : A village and police station on the low lands near the mouth of the Hoogly, on the west bank and 68 miles below Calcutta. It was formerly well known as a usual anchorage of the larger Indiamen. This article deals with the activities of one Scottish family—the Lennox family of Campsie in Stirlingshire—in Asian trade during the closing decades of the eighteenth century. The growth of private trade by Europeans in Asia in this period, and of the Agency Houses that managed much of their activity, is well-known. However, the classic studies of this subject have relied largely on official records and have used these to address issues in the history of imperial expansion. Thus standard accounts have tended to concentrate on the political relations between private traders and the East India Company, and to see private trade in the eighteenth century mainly as the by-product of the corruption of Company power. Viewed from inside the private business networks that made this possible, the perspective is rather different.

Taking a fresh look at the institutions of economic management in colonial India explains much about the history of the last decades of the raj. The concept of political economy—the interaction of economic forces and political choices—provides a useful approach to the study of government economic policy and practice that can give a new perspective on the history of the late British Empire as a whole.

The spectacular decline of the expatriate business houses of eastern India in this century is one of the many underdeveloped areas of Indian economic history. The extent of the decline itself seems hard to exaggerate. In 1900 almost all the commanding heights of the colonial economy appeared to the dominated by expatriate and foreign firms, most of them British. Not only was the foreign trade of Bengal almost exclusively in their hands, but so was the industrial and banking structure. In addition, most historians of the period have stressed that the expatriate sector was able to dominate internal trade, operating in amonopsony position in regard to cash crop production and marketing and also, thanks to its contacts with government, the railways and the port trusts, to enjoy hegemonic powers that impeded the development of indigenous rivals. Thus, as A. K. Bagchi has stressed, 'social discrimination was complemented and supported by political, economic, administrative and financial arrangements which afforded European businessmen a substantial and systematic advantage over their Indian rivals in India.' The fate of the expatriate groups since 1950 has beenvery different. Many suffered considerable depredations during and after the second world war, losing important sectors of their business to Indian rivals, and even being bought out entirely by native enter-prise. Such expatriate interests as survived after Independence have generally failed to perform well. Their recent history has been agloomy one of a steady erosion of profitability and viability, so that most of those that still remain are now taken seriously only by a new generation of indigenous speculators and asset strippers.

As with their opponents in the Government of India, one of the greatest problems faced by the all-India Congress leadership had always been that of central control. The Congress had had a national organisation and discernible leaders and interests at the all-India level since the 1880s. But, once the national movement had developed into more than the representative of small provincial groups interested in influencing opinion in Britain, the devolution of provincial government and the multiplication of political issues within India limited the role of the centre. By the first world war the central organisation of the Congress had become little more than an extension of dominant provincial interests, with no distinctive role of its own. It was Gandhi’s rise to prominence after 1916 that swung some of the initiative back to the centre. In 1920 Gandhi managed to forge a temporary alliance of all sections of Congressmen, under his own leadership, to pursue non co-operation as an expression of disgust and frustration at the 1919 Government of India Act and at the politicians able to make use of it.

The political and constitutional history of British rule in India is a story of the changing, modifying and rethinking of systems of control. To rule India successfully the British had to devise, and constantly to adjust, a structure of bureaucratic and political institutions which would allow them to control the vital areas of government while ensuring the cooperation or acquiescence of the bulk of their subjects. From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards the British Raj in India was the exception to every rule about the nature of the British empire. In the high Victorian period of informal expansion India had been held under formal, bureaucratic rule: in the later nineteenth century, when Britain’s formal empire was expanding in Africa and elsewhere, the control of India was being secured by increasingly informal techniques. Between 1919 and 1935 British policy makers were faced by the problem of how to create an institutional structure of government which would enable the central government to rule India effectively in a changing political climate. As this chapter will show, they failed to find a solution.

By the autumn of 1939 the Congress leadership had managed to secure at least partial control over the enlarged and diversified nationalist organisation that had emerged from the 1937 elections and the ministry period. In the struggle for the initiative between the established central Congress leaders and their provincial subordinates and radical critics, the goal of putting pressure on the British position in India had been somewhat lost to view. Threatened and actual confrontations with the Raj had proved useful devices in internal Congress politics, they had served to secure unity and to silence criticism early in 1937 and at the Haripura session, and to add a veneer of ideology to the Bose revolt. But between 1937 and 1939 the all-India Congress leaders had been fully occupied by internal problems and had had neither the opportunity nor the power to further the struggle against the British for freedom and independence directly. The manner in which the Congress had succeeded in seizing the initiative in the provinces in 1936–7 and in filling the vacuum in provincial government created by the 1935 Act disturbed and alarmed the British bureaucrats in India, but did not fundamentally affect the new imperial strategy of abandoning the provinces and retreating to entrenched positions in central government. When the British position in India was subjected to the first strains of a fresh attack in 1939 this came, not from any major accession of strength to its Indian opponents, but by the impact of the unprecedented imperial crisis of the Second World War.

The election victories in 1937 appeared to confirm the Congress claim to be the most powerful political institution in India. In theory, as their election manifesto had stated, the Congress had only fought the P.L.A. elections in order to destroy the 1935 constitutional settlement from the inside. The new strength of the Congress now seemed to put new weapons into the hands of the all-India leaders in their struggle against the British. The central Congress leaders were committed to preventing the federal scheme of 1935 being brought in and to obstructing its working if it were imposed. But in practice, the all-India leaders lost the ability, if not the will, to carry out these threats.